Notes Beside the Bamboo Window.
Yunqi Zhuhong (雲棲袾宏, 1535–1615), the eighth patriarch of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, kept no formal treatise's discipline in these pages — only a monk's own running notebook, entry by entry, written late in life at his hermitage on Mount Yunqi. Across three collections he takes up whatever crossed his attention: the old quarrel between Chan and Pure Land practice, Confucian scholars' objections to Buddhism and his own replies, lapses in vinaya discipline he witnessed firsthand, the customs and superstitions of his own time, and the karma stories — of retribution, of restraint, of a single act of mercy weighed against a life of harm — that he judged worth setting down. This collection translates all 398 entries in full, in the source text's own order.
How to read this collection
Zhuhong wrote the Zhuchuang Suibi in three separate collections (初筆, 二筆, 三筆) over the last years of his life, never revising them into a single continuous work — each entry stands on its own, numbered only within its own collection. Entries run from a few sentences to several pages; the First Collection's are the longest and most sustained, and entries grow shorter as the Second and Third Collections go on, several of the Third Collection's pages holding only a single entry. This site groups them into batches of consecutive entries per page, following the order Zhuhong himself gave them, and links every individual entry below directly to its place on the page.
A handful of entries in the Second Collection appear in the source not as separate numbered pieces but as companion notes folded into the entry just before them; those are read as part of their parent entry's page rather than linked separately here, matching how the source text itself presents them.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, entry by entry, in a running batch of consecutive numbers.
- A reading note closing each entry, drawn from the Huazang Study Group's commentary — original commentary informed by, not translated from, any single classical source.
- The source's own homiletic "淨語" sections, where present, omitted in favor of the discursive entries proper.
- A closing note on each collection's own final entry, marking where Zhuhong's own printing colophon ends the text.
Read by Collection and Entry
All 398 entries are translated. Each batch heading links to the full page; each entry chip links directly to that entry within it.
First Collection 初筆
Written first, and largest — thirty-two entries longer on average than either collection that follows.
Second Collection 二筆
Entries shorten steadily as the collection goes on, from thirty-entry batches down to clusters of three or four.
Third Collection 三筆
The final collection — most entries short enough that a single page holds only one or two, closing with Zhuhong's own printing colophon.
Translation Notes
A few conventions kept consistent across all 398 entries. See also this site's note on translation method.